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A teenager in Canada posted a youtube video about her years of bullying and torment at the hands of classmates, including being beaten by a bunch of girls and left in a ditch.
Yesterday she committed suicide.
What is wrong with kids? Can bullying EVER be stopped? -- I just don't get it.
There's a lot to this incredibly sad story. Not just bullying but obviously the action of an adult predator.
First - I teach my kids, and everyone should, that what goes online stays there forever. To never assume you are secure or private. Poor girl did a foolish thing in flashing. Once apon a time that would have been it, a long gone memory, but now kids don't have the luxury of being young and foolish - there's always someone there with a camera and in the anonymous world of the internet - someone to abuse it.
Secondly - there appears to have been a grown up here who may have diseminated images of a young girl undressed. I hope they catch him and charge him.
Thirdly - the girls who attacked her (and the boyfriend who instigated it) are despicable. What they did was to perpetrate an assault, plain and simple. They should be charged and the adults who witnessed it bear a large part of the responsibility for not having stopped it and followed through.
I think that the attitude that bullying is "what kids do" is the worst part. Much of the behaviour we see would be illegal and would result in jail time if carried out by adults. Yes, they are kids and kids think differently, but at the same time there have to be consequences - otherwise how will they learn? Our job as adults and parents is to train our kids, not look the other way.
Of course adults bully too - it is endemic in some workplaces.
They have the assault on video since the perpetrators filmed it. It shouldn't be hard for them to identify those girls and at least charge them with assault. It was assault.
I wouldn't be surprised to learn that the "man" demanding that she expose herself on line turns out to be another teenager or classmate. That person knew an awful lot about her.
Yes, this is an absolutely horrible, horrible tragedy.
There are many, many troubling factors in this case. The most glaring one is the lack of providing this girl with assistance and allowing her to continue going back online. It looks as though every time things started to look up, she'd get back online and be reminded of all the haters and their exploitation of her. She managed to move to a new city, but there was no escaping the cyber-bullying.
There was mention in the article that the police were involved. Why not pursue this and get FB accounts shut down? Very little mention of the parents (for whatever reason), so perhaps a social worker or someone else of authority should have pursued this, particularly since it involved photos of an underage girl.
Allowing a kid "loose" and unsupervised online is not very different than dropping them off in a horrible neighborhood at midnight. We can cry foul and prosecute any perpetrators, but this is really child neglect.
If we look at the awful bullying, some of these issues on their own are not necessarily criminal. The fact that she had some sort of romantic interlude with someone else's boyfriend - that's not terribly rare for teens. And an after school fight - unfortunately, it happens. Yes, this undoubtedly would have been scarring for the young teen, but people have had this happen. The bullying went to new heights when it hit the online world. It's hard to gather from the article, but did the poor girl not have any family members on her friend list that could see these horrible comments? Why not print out the screenshot and show it to administrators? Bring copies to the homes of the evil Facebook posters? Take copies to the police, to the mayor's office. Could someone not have shut off the online world for her? Could she not have found friends in a church group/sport/other activity - introduce her to the real world and close the online world?
After she drank bleach and came back from the hospital, the article says she went online and saw the horrible comments on FB people were making about her. Why was she online after this horrible incident? If a kid got mugged on a street corner, would we allow them back out to the same street corner when they return from the hospital stitched up? I don't get it.
The article mentions counseling - but no different course of action was taken.
It's absolutely horrible that this girl was emotionally tortured from 7th grade (prob 12-yrs-old) to the age of 15.
I know pointing the finger at mourning parents is terrible, but they were the only ones equipped to jump in and protect this girl. When parents can't protect their kids there are all kinds of disgusting elements they are exposed to.
When i was picked on in grade school, it was the worst feeling in the world. I was absolutely TERRIFIED of getting 'beat up'. It got to the point when i told my parents that i'm not going to school anymore, but i was forced to go. This was back in the day when there was no internet or whatnut, so the 'bullying' was not nearly as public as it is today. It was a time and place where you just had to deal with it yourself.
The greatest moment of my young life was when i stood up to the bully even though i figured i might get my butt kicked. One kid who was younger than me was 'acting all tough' because his older brother was a star jock and he just figured that he could do whatever he wanted because his brother would 'handle his battles'. What you dont realize as a kid is that the other brother is NOT going to go around beating up freshman or sophmores if he wants to retain his status as a popular senior jock. Anyway, i 'took care of the situation' and the guy never bullied me, or even spoke to me again.
I was lucky that i did not accept being berated, but i feel horrible for the kids who just dont have it in them to handle the bully the way the bully needs to be handled. And, what can the parents do? Its not like they can go to the school and smack the bully around, especially nowadays.
Its a really 'tough call' the school needs to be incredibly vigilant and monitor bullies and watch the weaker kids who get picked on, there's absolutely no reason for this stuff.
I think when i think back to these bullying moments, i cant ever imagine how my life would have turned out had i not defended myself, i might have regretted it the rest of my life.
I'm not sure if it can be completely stopped. Yet I do believe we could get the upper-hand on it.
If I were in charge of the school system, a required class that would have to be taken once in elementary school and once in high-school would be about bullying. The effects of it.
What a tragedy.
I think the bully should be made to feel the same pain as the bullyed. Over time the bully will come to see that what they are doing is wrong. For teenagers school is their life and everyone wants to fit in but what most of them don't realise is that when they graduate their real lives begin and what was once scandal or something terrible to cry about is now something that is silly. I think we can all look back to our youths and find something that we took so seriously then and laugh at it now. A girlfriend or boyfriend can be a kids entire life but in most cases we look back and think "how silly I was back then"
It is a shame this poor girl couldn't see the light at the end of the tunnel and things would get better with a older more wise perspective. True that in this internet age we all need to be careful what we post so I think kids need a reminder of this by taking a class at a young age then later on when the hormones are raging.
It doesn't seem like all these anti-bullying policies and educational programs are working. I have yet to hear about consequences for the bullies -- except for a few days suspension. Don't they realize that a suspension is a gift to most kids?
Maybe they ought to look at building in some negative consequences into the system, for kids who are identified as bullies (like the ones that filmed themselves beating up this girl, how hard would they be to identify?).
Things like:
- steep fines for the parents of the bully - the money goes to the bullied victim
- a year of community service
- having to carry around the books of the person they bullied at school for a year
- having to clean the bathrooms at school for a full year
- not being allowed to eat in the school lunch room for a year
Real, unpleasant consequences. Something to provide deterrance.
I agree Magnatomicflux, a very tragic death...but what I can't figure out is ,where were her parents? How could they not know the torment she was going through, and why didn't they help her?
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